Search engines never return what you want. They are good for general searches, but as your use advances, one seems to click on multiple pages, multiple links to get to the relevant information. Ranking by number of links has led to web masters linking with each other, increasing the number of links referencing a page, giving the page a higher rank. A higher rank allows the pages to be the first links in search results but the content might not be what the user is looking for. So when you search for a term as a mortgage loan or escaping xml, etc. you get results that might not be meaningful.
When a user searches for “Taco Bell” or “Panasonic TV” or “Laptop computer” or “need a mortgage loan”, the user is expecting to get information related to finding the restaurant “Taco Bell”, or buying a “Panasonic TV” or a “Laptop computer” or information about a “mortgage loan”. A user searching for “Panasonic TV” expects to see the popular models, models on sale, market competitive information, information about TVs, LCD TVs, etc. A user searching for a “Laptop computer” is interested in knowing more about a laptop computer, a computer, different models on sale, popular selections, market information, etc. For a “mortgage loan” or “need a mortgage loan” the user might be interested in, what is a mortgage loan?, types of loan products, current interest rates, different mortgage brokers, bankers, market competitive information, etc. A user searching for “relief from cough” or “tantrums 10 yr old” is looking to find information related to finding an immediate relief to the cough or how to overcome the tantrums thrown by the 10 yr old. The search engines with natural language ability do try to understand the context but again might not present the information needed by the user.
A definite need exists for an intelligent search engine with guiding information that could overcome the problems associated and described above. The idea is to use known information, semantic information and the intelligence of the users on the net to build an intelligent index that could present relevant information. Guiding Information, patent pending U.S. application Ser. No. 11/161,897 with Guide Selections provides expert information about a category and sub category along with market competitive information. So a user searching for a laptop computer can immediately become knowledgeable about buying a laptop and buy one online. A user searching for mortgage loans gets guiding information about mortgage, loans and can proceed on to buying one, while a user searching for “XML escaping”, will get information related to the problem of escaping XML. A primary purpose of the present invention is to solve these needs and provide further, related advantages.